


Things My Parents Left Me

by SophiaCatherine



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Jewish Leonard Snart, M/M, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-04-28 17:09:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14453922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SophiaCatherine/pseuds/SophiaCatherine
Summary: Things are... complicated, with family.Objects from their past catch Len and Mick unawares.





	Things My Parents Left Me

**Author's Note:**

> _“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”_ \- Pericles
> 
> [The little box that Len is putting up outside the warehouse, at the end of the story, is a [mezuzah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezuzah), which many Jewish people affix to the doorposts of their homes.]

**Central City, June 2015**

It’s the first time in a while that they’ve used a place like this as a safe house.

It’s a residential two-storey house, identical to the others on the street, in a crummy but very quiet part of town. Laying low after the incident at Ferris Air, they had abandoned their usual anonymous warehouses, and moved somewhere the Flash wouldn’t look for them.

Len really misses anonymous warehouses. The house makes him uneasy.

They’re in the sparsely-furnished living room - just enough to maintain the illusion of suburban family life - and Len’s pouring over blueprints for an antiques gallery with a $100,000 Amati violin coming up for sale. He glances up to see Mick staring blankly at the laptop screen with his mouth open. “Mick, how goes recon?” he asks pointedly.

At the desk, Mick clicks his lighter on.

Len turns a sharp gaze in his direction. “Mick,” he says, eyeing the flame more than the screen. “You _are_ looking up the auction house schedule, yes?”

“Yeah, I got it, buddy,” Mick snaps back, but he doesn’t move.

Getting up, Len strolls over. He leans on the desk next to Mick and takes a sip from his coffee. “What’s this?”

“It was my mother’s,” Mick says, gruffer even than usual.

Len peers at the screen. “Where in the hell did your mother get a Moorcroft vase?”

He shrugs. “That what it is?”

“Yeah,” Len says, reading the screen. “Damaged, but an antique. Not worth much, in the grand scheme of things. Two, maybe three hundred.”

Mick huffs. “Not much?” he mutters, a hard edge to his voice.

Len jabs his finger against the screen. “You really think it's hers? Gotta be a few of those vases out there.”

His eyes glued to the screen, Mick points at the second picture, a close-up of the vase. “See this?” He points at the chip in the rim. “She complained about that fucking chip all the time. I’m not _sure_ , but… Who’s selling it?”

Reaching across him, Len clicks the mouse. “Keystone branch.”

Mick makes a face. “It’ll be her waste of a son.”

“...Whose?”

“My aunt.” Len watches as Mick shifts in his chair. “She got me some things out, after the fire,” he says, tone muted. “There wasn’t much. Said she kept a few keepsakes for herself.” He looks away from the screen. “Just the pricey ones, I guess. Bitch.” Seeing Len’s look, he shrugs. “Well, fuck it, she’s dead now.”

Len hums uncertainly. “It's been a while.”

Mick laughs. “You’re not kidding.” He leans back hard in his chair. “Thirty-one years,” he says like he doesn’t have to count them. His eyes drift up towards the ceiling. “Won’t know for sure unless I see it up close. Might do, then.”

Len switches his attention from the screen to his partner, turning to lean against the desk and face Mick. He’s pale, his face straining into tight lines and a set jaw.

“You want it?” Len says, after a minute.

Mick looks back at the screen.

“No,” he says.

Then he gets up, clicks off his lighter, and slinks away.

Leaving Len trying to figure _that_ out. The bastard.

* * *

 

In the dark, Len wakes suddenly.

Beside him, Mick doesn’t stir.

Len lets his head fall quietly back against the hard wall.

After a minute he slides out of bed and fades down to the kitchen.

He makes cocoa, leaning hard against the counter. All they have is the cheap powdered stuff and some milk - no luxuries like marshmallows - but he’s used to that. The basic jars and packets are all he’s ever known. He would get it for Lisa when she was really young, whenever he could scrounge a dollar from somewhere, or lift the occasional jar off a corner store shelf. They used to pretend it was something better.

He taps his fingers repeatedly against his phone in his pocket and stares at the bare white kitchen wall.

Then he takes the phone out, noting _4.42am_ in the top left-hand corner. After a long moment he opens his messages and texts Lisa.

_You still got that briefcase of Dad’s? Could I borrow it sometime?_

No reply, of course, but he can’t take it back now.

He carries the mug of cocoa up to the tiny back bedroom that overlooks the yard. The room’s too quiet to be useful for much, furnished with nothing but a chair amid peeling wallpaper. It overlooks a wild yard, and he gazes out into the empty dark.

The silence settles inside him, bleak and familiar.

_His tiny room at the back of the house. Just two doors between his and Lisa’s, and he could bolt the short distance between the rooms in the dark if he had to. It wasn’t every night, wasn’t even often enough to be routine - but he knew when Lewis came home drunk and angry enough. And then he’d sit up half the night, waiting for the silence to end._

He sits for maybe an hour. His untouched cocoa goes cold.

As dawn creeps over the garden, an ethereal Mick appears behind him in the doorway.

“You too?” Len says, not looking back.

Mick comes to stand behind him. He’s not quite in his space, but Len can feel the heat radiating off him. Len glances back to see him in nothing but underpants.

“How are you not freezing?”

Mick doesn’t reply. He doesn’t say anything for a while. Then, “Tomorrow I’ll go check out the auction house.”

“Thought you were leaving that to Denton?”

Mick snorts. “Denton’s a useless fuck. I’ll case the place.”

Len feels him sliding closer behind him. Suddenly, soundlessly, Mick’s arms twist around Len’s body.

" _Don’t_ ,” Len says, jerking away.

Mick pulls back. He retreats into the darkness as quietly as he came.

Much later, Len follows him back to bed, crossing the hallway as silently as he’s never forgotten how to. Just another ghost.

* * *

 

The briefcase is sitting on the coffee table.

Len’s focused on his plans, laid out across the dining table on the other side of the room.

The slamming door makes Mick’s presence known twenty seconds before he arrives in the living room and throws himself across the sofa.

“Debrief,” Len orders.

Mick doesn’t move.

Len narrows his eyes. He gets up. “Mick,” he warns as he approaches the couch.

Mick finally looks up over the back of the sofa as Len nears. “Auction house security’s basically what we thought,” he says, slipping effortlessly but listlessly into recon mode. “Guard bribed. I’ll put a schedule together. Lots 118 through 220 are up on Wednesday. Your fiddle’s already in the safe - once we get past security, that’s all there is. We can do it with explosives or you can crack it. Whatever you want.”

Len nods. “And your vase is lot 127, yes?” he says, tapping the back of the couch.

The look Mick gives him is bleak. “I said I don’t want it.”

" _Please_ , Mick," Len sighs, sprawling against the back of the couch and trying to meet Mick’s eye. “You’ve been in a mood since you found the damn thing. One extra vase isn’t going to add to the load. Just get it.”

Mick has his lighter out again, his eyes dull and unfocused, and it’s clearly the end of the conversation.

Over Mick’s shoulder, the briefcase catches Len’s eye.

He goes back to his plans.

* * *

 

The pro of a back yard is that Mick has somewhere to burn things. For a while, Len just stands at the back door and watches the fire, from a safe distance.

“So,” Len says as he sits down beside him. Getting no response, he tries, “We all set for tonight?”

Mick bristles immediately. “Yeah,” he mumbles.

“Mick -” Len starts.

Mick interrupts with an irate sigh. He puts his head on his folded arms, turning it to look in Len’s vague direction. “You got anything of your mother’s? Things she passed down to you, anything?”

Len’s head snaps up as he looks at him, properly, for the first time since he sat down. Mick looks tired. “One or two things,” Len replies carefully.

Mick nods, then turns his head on his arms to stare at the fire. “I got nothing,” he says after a minute. “Had a few things, once. They got lost, moving between safe houses, being on the run...” He shrugs. “Or they got broken in the Home.” There’s a pause, then Mick says, “I _hated_ that fucking vase.”

Len raises an eyebrow but doesn’t interrupt.

“She insisted on keeping it on a windowsill outside my room. I ran into it when I was eight, knocked the fucking thing onto the carpet. I lucked out - it only chipped.” His eyes narrow. “My dad tore a few strips off me anyway.”

Len still doesn’t say anything.

Mick trails off. His eyes are downcast, looking more at the ground than at the fire.

" _Mick_ ," Len says, finally impatient.

“Thirty-one years,” Mick says in tacit reply, echoing his earlier comment. He lifts his head and catches Len’s questioning look. He looks back at him meaningfully. “Yesterday.”

Len’s eyes widen just a fraction. “You didn’t say.”

Mick snorts. “And what would you have said back, huh?”

Frowning, Len doesn’t take his eyes off him. They don’t do this. They don’t _talk_ about things like this. Except under very specific circumstances, like blackout drunk (Mick, mostly) or panic attack (Len, mostly).

But it’s Mick. It’s his _family_.

Ghosts who’ve been haunting him through empty hallways for… thirty-one years, apparently.

So Len does the only thing he knows how. He touches him on the back, almost imperceptibly, and says, “Tonight. Lot 127. If you don’t grab it, I will.”

Then he stands up, and leaves him to his misery.

He wanders back into the house and picks up the briefcase, rifling through files, pulling something out at random. He sags into a chair, staring grimly at it.

It’s an old, faded photo of three people on a pier. A man, a woman, and a little boy, no older than five. The boy has an ice-cream. They’re all smiling.

_He’d begged - Ice cream, daddy, please, please - till his father had given in. And they’d laughed and laughed. Some days, back then, his father still remembered how._

Len rubs a hand across his face. He puts the photo back in the file. He puts the file back in the case. He gets up and puts the case in a drawer, and locks it.

Later, they will return to the house a few choice antiques richer, and Mick will take his mother’s vase and hide in his room for the next day or two.

But not before he nods at Len in a way that, after nearly thirty years together, Len thinks might mean _thank you_.

* * *

 

**Central City, September 2015**

It’s the first thing he puts up, every time, from safe house to safe house, from murky squat to low-rent apartment. When he lived in one tiny room, after he first moved out of Lewis’s house, it went up on the lintel in the crumbling shared hallway. His own tiny threshold - a thrill like freedom.

The mezuzah is a simple silver box, dented and a little bent down the middle. It’s turning dark gray with age, no matter how often he cleans it. The back of the box is missing, so that he can’t put the little piece of parchment in anymore, and he knows that’s a problem for those that take these things seriously. Other things matter more to him.

Here, he has to roll up the blue warehouse door from beneath, hefting against rusted years of disuse. Has to look for somewhere to place the box, for want of a door frame. He eventually settles on the uncovered brick wall next to the entrance.

 _Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu_ , he always says as he puts it up in the makeshift doorway. He continues for as much of the blessing as he remembers, which is not all of it.

“You gonna help shift boxes, or what?” Mick says, laden down with them, as he pushes past him and through the door.

“In a minute.”

Mick returns, after a minute, and nods at the mezuzah. “I can’t believe you can still always find that thing.” He comes to lean against Len in the doorway. He bumps Len’s shoulder. “‘s broken.”

Len nods. He slouches against the outer wall of the warehouse, one leg across the other. “I tell you it was my mother’s?” he says.

 _And she said her mother brought it with her from Ethiopia and he doesn’t even know if that’s true but he’s not buying something brand new that won’t mean_ home _like this one does_ , he doesn’t say.

The sun is setting below the parking lot behind them. A car screeches past.

“Huh.” Mick’s in a jovial mood, it seems, and a beer appears in his hand from nowhere. Len tilts his head in thanks. “She religious?” Mick asks, nodding at the mezuzah. And Len doesn’t know if this is just the first time he’s ever asked Len about his mother’s religion, or the first time he’s ever asked about her at all.

“Hard to say,” Len drawls.

Mick nods like he’s familiar with the concept. He gestures inside. “Coming?”

“In a minute,” he says softly.

He gets another nod, and Mick retreats inside.

Len stands at the threshold and looks at the mezuzah. Then he taps it once, smiles, and goes home.

Inside, Mick is dragging boxes around.

“You want a fire?” Len asks with a smile.

Mick raises his eyebrows and gestures around the mostly-empty warehouse.

Len puts one finger up. Then he strolls back outside, and pulls in a metal trashcan with him when he returns.

“That’s gonna get awful hot,” the arsonist notes in an expert tone.

Len points at the concrete floor of the warehouse. “Don’t get too close to the damn thing, and you’ll be fine.” He tilts his head meaningfully at Mick.

“Gotcha,” Mick says. He starts building a fire, while Len starts unpacking boxes.

As Mick gets things burning, Len’s eyes fall on a box he’d marked “S.” He kneels down next to it, and carefully pulls out a weathered black case. “Hey,” he says to Mick. “Wanna see something?”

Mick grins. “Please, sit at my fireside,” he says, gesturing, and pulls out two crates. He sits on one. “What you got there?” he asks.

“Pictures,” Len says, and sits down. He passes the picture of the three of them on the pier over to Mick. “Me,” he points at the boy. “Mom,” as he indicates the woman.

“Makes _that_ your dumpster fire of an old man, I presume?” Mick provides, jabbing the picture.

“Yeah,” Len says. Looking at the picture, he tries not to smile, but it happens. “He wasn’t always...” he says softly, and trails off.

Mick just _hmph_ s.

He reaches in and pulls out another, looks at it, and smiles. “Better one of Mom,” he says, and again passes the picture to Mick.

“Huh,” Mick says approvingly. “You look more like her.”

Len’s nod is appreciative.

Mick waves at the case. “What else you got?”

It’s the strangest evening by the fire with family pictures that he can imagine, but they never were much like other people.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to [Tobyaudax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tobyaudax/pseuds/Tobyaudax) and [jessicamiriamdrew](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessicamiriamdrew/pseuds/jessicamiriamdrew) for reading this through for me. Thanks to [areyouarealmonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/areyouarealmonster/pseuds/areyouarealmonster) for the suggestion of the mezuzah, and to the peeps in the Flash Trash discord chat for other object ideas.
> 
> Comments very welcome. I always reply!
> 
> On tumblr [here](https://sophiainspace.tumblr.com/).


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